leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party (from 1920/21) and chancellor (Kanzler) and Führer of Germany (1933–45). He was chancellor from January 30, 1933, and, after President Paul von Hindenburg’s death, assumed the twin titles of Führer and chancellor (August 2, 1934). Hitler’s father, Alois (born 1837), was illegitimate. For a time he bore...

celebrated Roman general and statesman, the conqueror of Gaul (58–50 bce), victor in the civil war of 49–45 bce, and dictator (46–44 bce), who was launching a series of political and social reforms when he was assassinated by a group of nobles in the Senate House on the Ides of March. Caesar changed the course of the history of the Greco-Roman world...

black nationalist and the first black president of South Africa (1994–99). His negotiations in the early 1990s with South African Pres. F.W. de Klerk helped end the country’s apartheid system of racial segregation and ushered in a peaceful transition to majority rule. Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993 for their...

member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Eskimos (Inuit and Yupik /Yupiit) and Aleuts are often excluded from this category, because their closest genetic and cultural relations were and are with other Arctic peoples rather than with the groups to their south. (See also Sidebar: Tribal Nomenclature: American Indian, Native...

Indian king (reigned 1674–80), founder of the Maratha kingdom of India. The kingdom’s security was based on religious toleration and on the functional integration of the Brahmans, Marathas, and Prabhus. Early life and exploits Shivaji was descended from a line of prominent nobles. India at that time was under Muslim rule: the Mughals in the north and...

North American Plains Indians of the Caddoan linguistic family. The cultural roots of Caddoan-speaking peoples lay in the prehistoric mound-building societies of the lower Mississippi River valley. The Arikara were culturally related to the Pawnee, from whom they broke away and moved gradually northward, becoming the northernmost Caddoan tribe. Before...

member of the Scandinavian seafaring warriors who raided and colonized wide areas of Europe from the 9th to the 11th century and whose disruptive influence profoundly affected European history. These pagan Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish warriors were probably prompted to undertake their raids by a combination of factors ranging from overpopulation...

Viking whose life passed into legend in medieval European literature. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ragnar was said to be the father of three sons— Halfdan, Inwaer (Ivar the Boneless), and Hubba (Ubbe)—who led a Viking invasion of East Anglia in 865 seeking to avenge Ragnar’s murder. In the European literature of the several centuries following Ragnar’s...

Liberal politician and prime minister of Canada (1968–79; 1980–84). His terms in office were marked by the establishment of diplomatic relations with China (1970) and improved relations with France, the defeat of the French separatist movement, constitutional independence from the British Parliament, and the formation of a new Canadian constitution...

any member of the traditionally itinerant people who originated in northern India but live in modern times worldwide, principally in Europe. Most Roma speak some form of Romany, a language closely related to the modern Indo-European languages of northern India, as well as the major language of the country in which they live. It is generally agreed...

German National Socialist (Nazi) politician, police administrator, and military commander who became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. The son of a Roman Catholic secondary-school master, Himmler studied agriculture after World War I and joined rightist paramilitary organizations. As a member of one of those, Ernst Röhm ’s Reichskriegsflagge...

member of an ethnic and linguistic group living in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Anatolia, the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, portions of northern Iraq, Syria, and Armenia, and other adjacent areas. Most of the Kurds live in contiguous areas of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey —a somewhat loosely defined geographic region generally referred to as Kurdistan...

a leader of the Nazi Party and one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state in Germany. He was condemned to hang as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg in 1946 but took poison instead and died the night his execution was ordered. Göring was born in Bavaria, the second son by the second wife of Heinrich Ernst...

Powhatan Indian woman who fostered peace between English colonists and Native Americans by befriending the settlers at the Jamestown Colony in Virginia and eventually marrying one of them. Among her several native names, the one best known to the English was Pocahontas (translated at the time as “little wanton” or “mischievous one”). She was a daughter...

a member of an early Indo-European people who from the 2nd millennium bce to the 1st century bce spread over much of Europe. Their tribes and groups eventually ranged from the British Isles and northern Spain to as far east as Transylvania, the Black Sea coasts, and Galatia in Anatolia and were in part absorbed into the Roman Empire as Britons, Gauls,...

aboriginal inhabitants of the area of the Central Andes in South America. Although the Andes Mountains extend from Venezuela to the southern tip of the continent, it is conventional to call “Andean” only the people who were once part of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire in the Central Andes, or those influenced by it. Even so, the Andean region is very...

term used historically to describe any member of the Germanic peoples who, from the 5th century ce to the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), inhabited and ruled territories that are today part of England and Wales. According to St. Bede the Venerable, the Anglo-Saxons were the descendants of three different Germanic peoples—the Angles, Saxons, and...

Nahuatl-speaking people who in the 15th and early 16th centuries ruled a large empire in what is now central and southern Mexico. The Aztecs are so called from Aztlán (“White Land”), an allusion to their origins, probably in northern Mexico. They were also called the Tenochca, from an eponymous ancestor, Tenoch, and the Mexica, probably from Metzliapán...

any member of a people speaking the Sami language and inhabiting Lapland and adjacent areas of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland, as well as the Kola Peninsula of Russia. The three Sami languages, which are mutually unintelligible, are sometimes considered dialects of one language. They belong to the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family. Almost...

member of a Polynesian people of New Zealand. Traditional history and first contact Their traditional history describes their origins in terms of waves of migration that culminated in the arrival of a “great fleet” in the 14th century from Hawaiki, a mythical land usually identified as Tahiti. This historical account provides the basis for traditional...

king of the Huns from 434 to 453 (ruling jointly with his elder brother Bleda until 445). He was one of the greatest of the barbarian rulers who assailed the Roman Empire, invading the southern Balkan provinces and Greece and then Gaul and Italy. In legend he appears under the name Etzel in the Nibelungenlied and under the name Atli in Icelandic sagas....

North American Indians of Iroquoian lineage who constituted one of the largest politically integrated tribes at the time of European colonization of the Americas. Their name is derived from a Creek word meaning “people of different speech”; many prefer to be known as Keetoowah or Tsalagi. They are believed to have numbered some 22,500 individuals in...

any member of the North American Indian tribes speaking a language of the Iroquoian family —notably the Cayuga, Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. The peoples who spoke Iroquoian languages occupied a continuous territory around Lakes Ontario, Huron, and Erie, in present-day New York state and Pennsylvania (U.S.) and southern...

Nazi doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp (1943–45) who selected prisoners for execution in the gas chambers and conducted medical experiments on inmates in pseudoscientific racial studies. Mengele’s father was founder of a company that produced farm machinery, Firma Karl Mengele & Söhne, in the village of Günzburg in Bavaria. Mengele studied...

in English usage, a Moroccan or, formerly, a member of the Muslim population of what is now Spain and Portugal. Of mixed Arab, Spanish, and Amazigh (Berber) origins, the Moors created the Arab Andalusian civilization and subsequently settled as refugees in North Africa between the 11th and 17th centuries. By extension (corresponding to the Spanish...

small Middle Eastern religious sect characterized by an eclectic system of doctrines and by a cohesion and loyalty among its members (at times politically significant) that have enabled them to maintain for centuries their close-knit identity and distinctive faith. The Druze numbered more than 1,000,000 in the early 21st century and live mostly in...

member of a nomadic pastoralist people who invaded southeastern Europe c. ad 370 and during the next seven decades built up an enormous empire there and in central Europe. Appearing from beyond the Volga River some years after the middle of the 4th century, they first overran the Alani, who occupied the plains between the Volga and the Don rivers,...

member of a group of followers in India of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster. The Parsis, whose name means “Persians,” are descended from Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India to avoid religious persecution by the Muslims. They live chiefly in Bombay and in a few towns and villages mostly to the north of Bombay, but also at Karachi (Pakistan) and...

any of the Indo-European speakers of Germanic languages. The origins of the Germanic peoples are obscure. During the late Bronze Age, they are believed to have inhabited southern Sweden, the Danish peninsula, and northern Germany between the Ems River on the west, the Oder River on the east, and the Harz Mountains on the south. The Vandals, Gepidae,...

one whose native language is Arabic. (See also Arabic language.) Before the spread of Islam and, with it, the Arabic language, Arab referred to any of the largely nomadic Semitic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. In modern usage, it embraces any of the Arabic-speaking peoples living in the vast region from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of Africa,...